Tomo, not as in Friend
by Amielleon
Summary: Yu gets a cat. Yosuke's jealous of that cat. It's a more complicated story in practice.
1. Yosuke

Far too late, Yosuke realized that he had signed off on his own misery one incredibly mundane evening, when Yu was double-checking the contract while he was packing their things. "Yosuke," Yu had said out of the blue; Yosuke made a sound that said he was listening. "Since we'll own the house ourselves, we could keep a pet. Would you mind if we got a cat?"

Yosuke briefly thought about the idea of keeping a cat, some fluffy cute creature that ate and slept and wanted to be pet or something, and—mostly trying to figure out how to pack a lamp—answered, "Sure. Why not."

"Just checking," Yu said.

Yosuke wrapped the light bulb in a sock and eyed the ceramic base. "Do we have any bubble wrap left?"

"Don't think so."

"Dammit."

A month later, early morning on a Sunday after a night of very good sex, Yu said, "Let's go pick out a cat today," and Yosuke said, "Okay," before he was completely awake.

He had been under the impression that this would involve a quick trip to the nearby pet store. The trip was not quick. The two of them—Yosuke with a giant bag of cat food in one arm and a shopping bag of bowls and litter boxes and miscellanea with the other; Yu with a giant bag of cat litter that Yosuke could barely pick up—hauled entirely too many supplies by foot back to their house.

Yu let the litter down gently on the floor, breathing hard and cracking his neck, but giving no sign that he regretted everything. Completely spent and sprawled out on the couch, Yosuke said, "Ugh. Man. We should've taken a taxi."

"Are you tired?" Yu asked, as if his own hair weren't stuck to his forehead with sweat.

"I'm dying over here," Yosuke said, like he hadn't been perfectly capable of carrying tons of boxes during their move. Yu came over and offered him a hand, which Yosuke accepted on instinct, even thought he felt like laying there a little longer. "Coming to think of it. What about the actual... cat?"

"We'll stop by the shelter after we set up here." He gestured to the supplies that Yosuke had dumped unceremoniously on the floor.

Yosuke fell back into the couch with a dramatic groan. "All right. Just give me a moment, partner, and we can..." Yosuke's voice trailed off as Yu's words sank in. "Shelter? You mean pet store?"

"Shelter," Yu repeated with a hint of a frown.

"Dude, the pet store's right there! Isn't the shelter on the other side of town...?"

"We can take a taxi back," Yu offered. Yosuke would later understand that this was to avoid stressing out the cat, never mind stressing out Yosuke, and the very first of the many small ways Yu was more considerate of a small annoying animal than his partner.

The subway ride to the animal shelter was fairly quiet. Yosuke occupied a seat and refused to yield it for the bratty children that came on board, because he had just been made to carry 15 kilograms of stuff in his arms for six city blocks for no pay and was now being marched across the city to pick up a furry animal he had no interest in but would be obligated to share his space with for who-knows-how-long. The children, on the other hand, were still full of the energy and optimism of youth. They could stand.

Halfway there, it seemed to him that Yu was inspecting him, and he said, "What?"

"You look pretty beat," Yu observed unhelpfully.

Yosuke shrugged, uncrossed his arms and recrossed them the other way. He didn't actually say something to Yu, like _This is too sudden, I don't even like cats, and I wanted to do other things on our only day of the week off from work, of course I feel like shit_, because although that was how he felt, he wouldn't say that on a public subway even if he could put it into words. Instead, he said, "How is it still morning?"

In hindsight, if Yu had been as perfect as half the world believed him to be, he probably should have asked Yosuke—while he had his full attention and before they arrived at the shelter—if he was truly all right with getting a cat. It would have been the fairest thing to do, to both Yosuke and the cat.

Instead, Yu cracked a small smile, one of his accommodating I'm-glad-we're-still-all-right smiles, and the topic slipped by. Because one of Yu's imperfections had always been that he left it up to everyone else to start important conversations, and Yosuke didn't have it in him to bring it up like he was actively forbidding Yu from getting his cat.

So they went to the shelter. And Yu got his cat. It went something like this: a volunteer worker who seemed to hate him and love Yu for no reason (like everyone else), a fucking ton of cats lined up along the walls all of which Yu seemed to want to take home, and finally one incredibly ugly calico cat with a face like Vladmir Putin that did not so much "nyaa" as it did make a strained braying sound like it was being strangled to death. Yu somehow decided _that _catwas The One, on account of its ability to open its own cage from the inside which, to Yosuke, sounded like the worst possible trait for a cat to have.

"His name is Tomo," Yu announced in the taxi over the cat's psuedo-dying cries.

"Like 'friend'?" Yosuke said, not really interested, but preferring the sound of Yu's voice to the cat's.

"No, just Tomo."

Tomo made a dying sound again, and Yosuke took some comfort in the fact that the taxi driver seemed just as annoyed as he was.

At home, Yu wrote _Tomo_ on the bowls in permanent marker, as if there was any doubt who would be eating cat food out of the bowls on the floor. Meanwhile, Tomo stayed behind the sofa, where it had been since they let it out of the carrier.

"Is it going to take a piss back there?" Yosuke said, arms crossed, leaning against the counter. The house had only been theirs for a few weeks but Yosuke liked how it smelled.

"He's just anxious about being in a new place," said Yu, first time pet owner and master cat psychologist. "He'll come out when he's ready." Upon second thought, Yosuke was fine with the cat staying under the couch and out of the way.

Out of the blue, Yu proposed, "Let's watch a movie tonight."

"Making progress on that list of classics?"

"Actually, I was thinking of Dumminator 4."

—The latest entry in a series of movies they'd watched together six years ago, when they were teenagers craving special effects and explosions and didn't cringe at the crappy script. As young professionals, they did cringe at the script, and the fights were kind of awkward and the sfx unconvincing, but it was nice sharing a throw, touching shoulders, and laughing about how nothing in the movie seemed dangerous at all after everything they'd been through.

Halfway through, Yu slung an arm across his back and rubbed absentmindedly at the muscles at the base of his neck. He knew Yu didn't personally get anything out of this stuff, and that Yu knew Yosuke did, and it was his wordless way of saying _Sorry about today. Let me make it up to you,_ when Yu didn't think that he'd done something _wrong_ so much as he'd been imperfect in the execution.

Yosuke let him massage him. He was still stiff from his workout this morning, so it felt nice. It put him in the mood to forgive him, which was probably playing exactly into Yu's schemes. But that was all right, too. Some ripped American actor finished saving the world, Yu was trying to make things up to him, and whether or not there was a cat, their lives were still fundamentally the same.


	2. Tomo

Yu loved Tomo.

Yosuke couldn't see why. Tomo left the house smelling like shit and kicked up a fine spray of tiny rocks that dug into his feet if he didn't wear socks. Tomo dropped a mess of fragmented kibble bits around his bowl that left a thin layer of sticky oil on the kitchen floor even if you picked it up. Tomo liked drinking from the toilets and then sticking that same mouth in Yu's face in the morning while kneading incessantly at his hair. Yu didn't even like it when Yosuke touched his hair, so Yosuke didn't understand why this earned the _cat_ a kiss on its toilet-wet nose.

Despite Yosuke's protests, Yu let Tomo have the full run of the house. This meant that the laundry had to be folded and put in drawers right away unless he wanted a layer of cat hair on his shirts and intimates alike. It was a minor blessing that Tomo did not chew on cords, or pee on any soft unsuspecting surfaces. But it did like to attack Yosuke's feet if he wiggled them, which trained him within a very short period of time to stay still while listening to music. (Yosuke had never been this still before in his life.)

Which Yosuke felt was completely unfair. _Yu_ should have trained _Tomo_ not to be a little vicious creature that attacked people in their own house. But Yu would just chide it with a single interjection of "Tomo!" which Tomo never took to heart.

It was all this power and lack of discipline, Yosuke thought, that led Tomo to believe that it outranked him and was duty-bound to protect the natural order through ritualized displays of aggression.

One night in the middle of the week, when he had to get up as early as always the next morning to plaster a giant smile on his face while talking to people about preparing for the possible death of their loved ones, Yosuke suddenly awoke to something on his chest. He opened his eyes in time to see Vladmir Putin snake-hissing in his face, and yelped a half-asleep, "What the fuck!" as Tomo hopped away.

"Tomo!" Yu sighed, turning over slightly to look at where Tomo leapt off the bed, before making himself comfortable again and falling back asleep.

And perhaps it wasn't very realistic to expect Yu to defend Yosuke's honor at hell-o-clock-in-the-morning, but by now he was feeling frustrated and on edge, so he rolled over, taking slightly too much of the blanket, and pointed ignored Yu, who probably didn't notice on account of being asleep.

Work sucked when he hadn't gotten enough sleep. Then again, being home with the cat wasn't much better.

If loving that cat were just one of Yu's eccentricities, Yosuke thought that he might have been able to get their old friends together and talk to him about keeping the cat under control.

The problem was that everyone else loved Tomo too.

"He's so—pfftt—ugly!" Yukiko laughed over Skype, each little peal completely adoring. "I _love_ ugly animals. They're so cute! Chie, come here. Chie! Come look at Yu's cat." Chie came over and poked her tiny nose on screen to take a look at Tomo—being held up to the webcam and looking thoroughly unamused—and Chie broke out into fawning sounds too. "Lookithim!" Yukiko went on. "Isn't he so funny looking!? Snnrrkkk—"

"I think he's a handsome cat," Yu said very seriously, which sent both of the girls into hysterics.

"No," Chie said between gasps, trying to calm herself down, "no, I'm sorry, he looks fine, it's just... doesn't he look kind of like Yosuke!?"

Yu said, "Hm," and turned Tomo around to have a nice long look at its face. Yosuke wished that Inaba never gained access to high-speed internet.

He may have spent a little longer in the bathroom that night, staring at himself in the mirror and convincing himself that he didn't look like a Russian politician, nor an ugly cat.

(_Dammit_, Chie. How did she always manage to kick him right where it hurt most?)

When he came out of the bathroom, he found Tomo lounging in the middle of their bed. And since workaholic Yu always came to bed late and wasn't around to hear him, Yosuke said, "I was here first."

Tomo didn't seem to care. Yosuke edged into the bed, trying not to offend it. The cat seemed suitably pleased with his meekness as he folded up one corner of the blanket and wrapped it around himself without pulling it from under where Tomo laid. _Fuck you_, Yosuke thought to himself as he turned off the lamp.

And then aloud, for good measure, "Fuck you." Tomo did not respond, and Yosuke felt foolish for bothering. He laid very still facing the edge of the bed for fearing of offending his feline overlord.

When Yu came to bed, Tomo got up and let Yu take his space, because Tomo loved Yu, and that was probably why he didn't understand how frustrated Yosuke was with the cat.

Yu made himself comfortable under the covers. All was silent for a moment, and then he said, "You're all the way over there."

"Your cat," Yosuke grumbled by way of explanation.

A few more moments passed before he heard the slither of blankets and felt Yu's hand on his arm. "Come here," Yu whispered, barely audible. Still feeling wronged, for a moment Yosuke considered pretending to have fallen asleep. But ultimately, it was the middle of the work week and he missed Yu too much to spite him. He rolled around and wormed greedily back into the middle of the bed, sharing one of their nightly check-in kisses.

_How did work go today?_

_Meh. Work is work. I'm happy to see you._

If it had to be put into words, Yosuke imagined it meant something like that, exchanged beneath the feeling of Yu's warm breath against his face. Yosuke only realized in that moment how much that the absence of this small routine (thanks to the usual suspect) had made him feel on edge. They didn't say "I love you" often—Yosuke might have said it once, many years ago, in the form of "I love you, man," when they first reunited after Izanami and he was feeling particularly sentimental, and once a few years later, just to see how it sounded. Otherwise, it was one of those things they knew well enough without having to speak words so embarrassingly open and overloaded with a style of romance they had never belonged to.

So instead Yosuke needed these fleeting daily gestures to prove that they were all right, that he hadn't done something unbelievably stupid when he first croaked out to his best friend that he might _like_ like him, in a series of events that led to where they were, frighteningly and wonderfully close, walking through a minefield strewn with things like where to live and how to spend their money and what counted as _tired_ as opposed to _pissy_, and sometimes Yosuke feared that what it all amounted to was the slow and painful discovery that he and his partner were people not meant to live together.

But with Yu trying his best to make things right for him, it seemed much more likely that it was just something anyone in their circumstances would have to sort out. Suddenly, Yosuke felt so warmly toward Yu that if he weren't so tired, he would have liked to throw back the blanket and shove him on his back. But it was the middle of the week and somehow, falling asleep sounded better. Being an adult was weird like that.


	3. Interlude

A lot of horrible things happen quietly. Like when Teddie vanished way back when Nanako had been in the hospital, and his first thought was that the stupid bear was goofing off while important things were happening. It took a few hours for the churning feeling in his gut to build up, not because anything had happened, but because _nothing _happened to reassure him that Teddie was all right.

Or when Chie's dog suddenly just fell asleep and died one night, and Yosuke found out when he checked his text messages in the bathroom in between classes, completely expecting a text from Chie to be about how bad the food was at Junes.

And maybe his feelings toward Yu were like that, something which had been perfect one day, then (without fanfare, without a set place and time) something he discovered to be muddled and sour a month later.

But when it comes to everything blowing up in your face—that takes a spark.

One day, a crash came from the living room.

Yosuke had been in the middle of the completely dumb task of crawling the internet in search of answers to why the refrigerator seemed to only work half the time (leaving them with a lot of spoiled food, which Yu seemed strangely insistent upon eating anyway) when he heard something thud to the floor. And then a second, with the sound of something hard breaking.

Yosuke ran down the stairs to find Tomo balancing on the wall shelf and a pair of picture frames lying on the ground below. The cat looked at him calmly as if it wasn't particularly doing anything wrong.

"Seriously!?" That fucking cat. Up until now it had just gotten on his nerves and jumped him in the night, but now it was _breaking their stuff_? With a sinking feeling, he bent down to pick the frames back up to see how bad it was. The glass on one of them had fractured, sending a spiderweb of cracks across Teddie's face in a picture of the three of them at Junes, when Teddie had finally decided to stay in Inaba instead of following them. If the break had been an inch to the right, it would've separated himself and Yu in some perfectly symbolic cheesy way. But instead, it was just a broken picture frame that had felt important to him and that was worse somehow, made him feel like it was really just another thing in his dumb insignificant life that this cat shat all over in any way it pleased.

Tomo observed him stoically. Like it didn't even care.

Something in him snapped. Before he knew entirely what he was doing, he had sprang back up to his full height and shot one hand out to grab the cat. Apparently caught off guard, Tomo dodged a little too late and Yosuke grabbed hold of a hind leg; instantly, Tomo arced around and clamped its teeth down onto his wrist and he hissed _shit_ in surprise because the thing had never bitten him _this_ hard before. He grabbed the back of its neck with his other hand and wrested his right hand free, its teeth and claws scraping a trail down to his knuckles. Tomo flailed and jolted in his grip, much more than just its nine pounds of bone and muscle, lashing its claws dangerously and hissing and growling, an animal out to kill. Yosuke held it as far away from his body as possible while keeping its face toward him.

"What the hell!" Yosuke yelled. "You don't do that!" He would've shaken it a bit if it weren't already so hard to keep his grip on the seizing and spitting creature. "You listen to me! Stop attacking me! Stop breaking our shit! Just stop! Stop being such a horrible little—"

Yosuke wasn't sure there was a word capable of describing what Tomo was just then. His words stuttered to a stop and instead he made a sound of rage. Tomo caught his sleeve with one claw, and he found his words again. "Stop it! Fuck! Let go, dammit!"

"Yosuke? What are you doing?" came Yu's voice in disbelief. Yosuke turned around to find Yu at the base of the stairs, still wearing his reading glasses, stunned at the sight before him. In that moment, Tomo jerked sharply and dropped from Yosuke's grip, clambering cartoonishly into a sharp turn to dive behind the sofa. "What were you doing!?" Yu repeated more forcefully as he came forward, a dark look crossing his face—a protective look, the look he'd given Namatame when his arm was around Nanako's throat, except this time it was meant to protect Tomo _from_ _Yosuke_ and that made him feel sick inside.

"What am _I_ doing? Your cat broke our shit and mauled me!" Yosuke said indignantly, showing Yu the bleeding cuts across the back of his hand.

The dark look ebbed from Yu's face, and for a moment Yosuke thought he was going to acknowledge that Yosuke was the victim here and something needed to be done. Instead, Yu said, "Don't grab him like that," like it was completely obvious that Yosuke had brought on his own misfortune.

"What the hell, man? 'Don't grab him'? He was knocking stuff to the floor, what was I supposed to do!? Let it and pet it for being such a _good boy_!?"

Yu pressed his lips together. "I mean that mistreating him won't accomplish anything."

"_I'm bleeding and you're still siding with the cat_. I can't believe you. What the fuck!"

"I'm not—" Yu broke off with a sigh and took off his glasses, rubbing at one eye with the heel of his hand. "I'm not taking sides. I'm just saying, he's a cat. You've got to understand that."

"Me!? I _know _it's a goddamn cat, what about _you_? I keep telling you to _control_ it and you never listen!"

Yu's eyes turned from tired to chilly. His finger closed where he held his glasses tightly by one end. "We can't talk like this."

"Yeah, you're right! You're completely right about that! It's impossible to talk to you once you're doing the..."—Yosuke made a meaningless gesture—"the thing where you're angry and that makes you _super reasonable_. Fuck!" Yosuke shoved past Yu to storm up the stairs.

"Where are you going?" Yu said too calmly.

"Getting my fucking mp3 player, why do _you_ care!"

Yu stayed silent as Yosuke retrieved his music player and shoved his headphones over his head, beyond caring about whether he bled all over them and the table. Yu was still at the bottom of the stairs with his arms crossed, looking in the direction of the sofa—thinking about Tomo no doubt—as Yosuke stormed back down.

"And you're still worried about the cat," Yosuke muttered as he passed.

"You should rinse that out," Yu said, glancing at the bleeding hand he had over his headphones. Somehow, rather than feeling touched, that just really ticked him off.

"Maybe _you_ should make your cat less vicious."

"Tomo acts out against you because you've given him absolutely no reason to like you," he said tersely.

"Great! Still my fault for being a loser." Yosuke just barely stopped himself from grabbing his nice coat with his bloody hand. He made for the kitchen to grab a towel, hating every moment he gave Yu to keep arguing with him.

"_Yosuke_," Yu sighed, like it should have preceded _Stop being such a child _or _It's not all about you _or something else Yu was too nice to say but was definitely thinking right then, thoughts made plain in the tone of a single word.

It should have been unfair to be angry with Yu for things he hadn't even said, but after enough time knowing him, it really wasn't. It was never anything that Yu _said_ that pissed him off, it was more about the entire way he acted at times like these. Aloof, above something so hot-headed and stupid as a lover's spat, completely in the right because he wasn't the one yelling. Kind of like his cat, coming to think of it.

No, it was completely fair to be angry at Yu because it was his fault in the first place and he kept pretending it wasn't.

Yosuke located a towel and gave his hand a quick rinse under the sink—kind of hating that the obvious thing to do was something Yu had claimed for himself as his advice—before wrapping the towel around it, clamping his fingers down on it to keep it in place, and stomping back to the front door. Yu kept watching him from that same spot by the base of the stairs, not saying anything, not arguing, just judging him silently. With his coat shrugged on and a hand on the doorknob, Yosuke found the courage to say, in a voice much less forceful than he'd imagined, "I don't want that cat in my house," before walking out and slamming the door behind him.

The cold fall night air hit his face as he stuffed his headphones over his ears, found the most angry metal song he had, and blasted it at full volume. He felt seventeen again. It wasn't entirely a bad feeling.

He crossed his arms and started to walk down the sidewalk, not caring where he was going. He had taken a lot of walks like these when he was younger, but it had been awhile since he felt like he needed to escape the house for awhile. What a horrible start to their new life together.

A middle-aged woman was walking toward him on the sidewalk. She must've heard the music leaking from his headphones. She took one look at his towel-wrapped hand and crossed the street, obviously trying to look discreet about it. _Fuck her too,_ Yosuke thought. _Probably the gossiping housewife type. Looks judgmental. Great. Wonder when they'll catch onto the fact that we're two men living together_.

Screw Yu coming in and ruining his life. Screw him and the cool way he could deal with everything. Screw him always thinking he's right.

Honestly, sometimes Yosuke had no idea why he ever liked the guy.

Eventually—still in the middle of plenty of unkind thoughts toward Yu, Tomo, and himself—he reached the end of the sidewalk, at a T-shaped intersection with a minor highway. Against all reason, he thought to himself that it was kind of a shitty end to the sidewalk. Back in Inaba, if you went far enough in any direction, you'd either hit a hill with trees and benches, or you'd end up at the Samegawa. Both were pretty good places to mope. But he supposed that in this unfamiliar place he'd have to learn where everything was, and until then he was stuck here at a dead end with nowhere to sit down and the intermittent passing car to intrude upon his privacy.

For a few minutes he just watched the cars pass. The metal singer's growling voice was still screaming something in English that Yosuke had never bothered to look up. He didn't really care what it meant, just that it sounded like how he felt when he was angry. By now all of his meaningful angry thoughts had run their course, and his mind was stuck endlessly repeating the same couple of moments that upset him the most.

The look on Yu's face when he said _what were you doing_.

The way he said _Yosuke_, just the tone of it, the last thing he said before Yosuke left the house.

One from long ago: _You seem to have some objections to... I just mean, if this isn't what you want, I don't want to force you into anything._

Yu had given him an out. Yu knew you shouldn't charge ahead with doubts eating at the back of your mind, and Yosuke had just laughed it off and said it didn't mean anything.

It actually ate a lot at him. He just didn't want to let Yu go.

Because he loved the bastard, despite everything.

And since Yosuke was frequently stricken with doubt over the dumbest things, he always figured that mattered more.

And now that he thought about it, he really should've made his feelings clear about the cat in a serious way before just exploding at Yu like that. And by now, Yu had probably calmed down (for real) and maybe he'd realized that he had been dismissing and ignoring Yosuke. Or maybe Yosuke ought to explain that to him, if he hadn't realized—awkward and dumb and girly as it sounded... on second thought, he hoped Yu realized it himself, like he usually did, because Yosuke could think of no way to explain it that wasn't hopelessly awkward and dumb and girly.

That moment of perfect clarity—where it seemed like all his problems had been amazingly simple and that he could fix them all—abruptly passed, and once again he was standing at an intersection, staring at cars and listening to teenager music and hating every stupid hangup he'd ever had.

He felt useless being out here, and he did feel less angry at least, so he pressed _stop_ on his music player, turned around, and started to head home.

Although he didn't think it would be easy, he still did think that he and Yu could work things out when he got back. Yosuke had at least made it clear how he felt about the cat. By now it had probably sunk in for Yu, and although Yosuke didn't think he'd be lucky enough to be rid of the thing, maybe Yu would start taking discipline seriously.

...Or something. Yosuke would have taken any sign that things would change and that Yu still cared for him as much as before.

His fingers were starting to feel stiff from holding the towel in place. He unwound it to inspect the wound. The bleeding had slowed to a trickle, but the wounds were raised and swollen and didn't look like they were going to go away cleanly. It would also be nice, Yosuke thought, if Yu acted like he cared about his hand getting cut into ribbons. The cold air felt kind of nice against his hot and itchy skin, so he let the towel dangle from his good hand on the way back.

When he got back home—that little house looking so new and sweet with warm lamplight glowing through the drawn curtains on the first floor—he didn't know what to expect if he opened the door. But a tired sense of calm had set in. As if his body moved by itself, he tried the door handle and found it unlocked. He stepped back into his house.

He saw Yu on the couch with Tomo on his lap. At the sight of Yosuke, Tomo leapt to the floor and went back behind the sofa. Yu didn't meet his eyes.

All at once, Yosuke didn't feel like he had the energy to try talking to Yu. Instead, he went upstairs and showered by himself, bandaged his hand by himself, and fell into their bed by himself. He discovered that when it came to Yu in the flesh and not Yu in his mind, Yosuke was still angry at him, and he even considered locking the bedroom door to demonstrate that point. But in the end, when he got up to turn off the lights, he decided that Yu could come apologize if he wanted to.

By the time he woke up to his alarm in the morning, he was still alone in the room.


	4. Yu

Note: This chapter originally contained a sex scene. I feel that the story flows better with it (which is why it was there to begin with) but as you probably know, FFN bans explicit works. You can find the explicit version of this chapter through my fic master list, which is linked on my profile.

* * *

Just as he expected, every potential customer noticed his bandaged hand and took a greater interest in staring at it than buying insurance from him.

When someone finally seemed interested enough to let him through the door and into the living room, Yosuke decided to get it out of the way by explaining with a laugh, "My roommate's cat attacked me."

"Oh," she said with a sympathetic nod. "It's no good when animals run wild in the house."

"Right?" Yosuke said, but he already wasn't thinking about ill-behaved cats. He had been trapped into thinking about how naturally "roommate" came out, the same little white lie he'd been telling for years. But today when it passed through his lips it seemed cruel for some reason he couldn't put into words. It must have had to do with their fight last night.

His train of thought left him quiet just long enough to be awkward. The woman filled in the pause kindly with, "Why don't you have a seat? I'll make us some tea." Yosuke sheepishly knelt at her traditional tea table and tried to force himself away from that train of thought. Trying to find the right angle for a sales pitch, his eyes fell on the pictures hung on their wall—a family portrait from what looked to be a decade ago with two children just on the verge of puberty, and an older one with a couple in traditional wedding garb, from before the woman had any wrinkles and looked quite beautiful.

Yosuke steeled himself to get ready to talk to her about how hard it would be if her husband died without life insurance.

Work these days was a lot of making very nice people worry about horrible things in the future. It had taken Yosuke himself over a year to fully process Saki's death, and she hadn't even really liked him. He didn't even want to begin thinking about Yu's death, about the loss of someone who not only liked him but loved him back. And here he was, planning to needle someone over the fear of losing someone they had loved for nearly as long Yosuke had been alive, just for his own monetary advantage. For all that it had eaten up his weekends and killed his back, working at Junes had been so much simpler. He had learned very shortly after taking this job that helping people buy things wasn't quite the same as _selling_ something.

But it was a job. With a company that didn't demand too much overtime, in the same city where Yu had gotten himself apprenticed as a budding lawyer.

—Every train of thought seemed to lead straight back to Yu.

When he'd finished canvassing the neighborhood, he rode his motorcycle back to the office and fished his lunch out of the fridge. Yosuke hadn't been that surprised to find that Yu still packed lunch for him despite everything. He'd found a bowl of rice and two boiled eggs waiting for him that morning as breakfast, too. Yu seemed neurotically dedicated to ensuring that Yosuke ate filling healthy meals three times a day every day, even when he was apparently so mad at him that he'd silently left for work before Yosuke had woken up—at six in the morning.

After a few minutes in the microwave, Yosuke took the plastic lid off the bowl, revealing a layer of rice and a suspiciously unappealing fragrance. He pushed the rice over to reveal the tofu and pepper mixture underneath.

Tofu. Yu knew exactly how he felt about tofu. Yu knew his tastes better than he did, which was usually great. But at times like these, it meant that every meal was a personalized "fuck you" told through tofu and fish and ginger and whatever else it was that Yu could put in a meal that somehow made Yosuke never want to take a second bite.

But he was hungry and not optimistic about dinner, and normal-smelling tofu was low on his list of offensive foods, so he somehow managed to finish lunch by mechanically taking one bite after another.

It wasn't too horrible. After the first big fight back when they started living together, Yu had subjected him to a round of deep fried weird organ meats sprinkled with crumbled seaweed, and made sure to inform him _after_ he had a bite in his mouth that it was bull penis.

So maybe Yu wasn't too angry with him this time. Or maybe he was saving the main course for dinner. Maybe Yosuke would come home and be served some disgusting red sea creature that looked like an alien bug enlarged to horrifying proportions.

Yosuke decided to do his own grocery shopping that afternoon after work. He bought some normal pork and normal carrots and normal bell peppers and hauled them home with the grim determination of a self-sufficient man who would not be cowed by his passive-aggressive cook/lover.

Tomo ducked behind the couch the moment he opened the door. Whatever. It was better if the cat was out of his way. Borrowing Yu's apron, Yosuke arranged everything on the counter and dug around for cutting boards and knives. Yu had gradually banned him from the kitchen during their apartment days—something about not cleaning the stove, or killing the engine of the blender, or some other hypervigilant gripe that amounted to Yu having a complex about controlling the kitchen—so Yosuke had never even touched the stove in this house before. With some amount of fumbling, he managed to get a decent pan and everything he needed.

Carried along by the momentum of being set up, Yosuke had already finished cutting the pork into thin slices before he realized that there was too much here for just one dinner.

_I'll probably need lunch for tomorrow_, part of him said.

_I could share this with Yu_, another part proposed.

_He doesn't deserve it._

_But imagine how much you'll mess up his evil culinary plans if he comes home and dinner's already completely taken care of._

He decided to offer it to Yu, and keeping it for lunch if the asshole decided he hated Yosuke too much to eat his food. Which would really hurt, Yosuke thought to himself sullenly. He didn't know what he'd do with himself if Yu was that furious at him.

_But there's no way he's that mad at me_, Yosuke tried to convince himself. _Probably._

His stir-fry was almost done by the time he heard the garage door opening. He did his best to stay calm and look normal as an eternity passed before the door clicked open.

With the solid sound of his footsteps and the rustling of a plastic bag, Yu came into sight.

"Welcome home," Yosuke said. "I made us dinner."

Yu stopped in the hall. He looked at Yosuke. He looked at his apron. He looked at the food on the stove. And something in his blue plastic bag _moved_.

"Dude," Yosuke said, unable to help himself, "what the heck is _that_."

"I was going to make us steamed fish," Yu said.

Yosuke tore his eyes away, but there was no escape from the sound of the fish intermittently flopping in the bag. "That's so disgusting. How is it still alive?"

"It's not," Yu said, joining him in the kitchen. "They're post-mortem muscle contractions."

"Thanks, partner. That's not creepy at all. I feel so much better."

Yosuke heard him set the bag down somewhere and open a drawer. Yu came up next to him with a pair of chopsticks, close enough that their sleeves brushed. He plucked a piece of pork from the pan and popped it into his mouth.

As far as he could tell, Yu was still getting over his surprise, and Yosuke wasn't sure if intruding into his kitchen and forcing dinner on him had made Yu angrier or happier. Yosuke tried to act cool; Yu was so close that he could hear him chewing. Yosuke kept tossing the cooked food in the pan, not wanting to reach out and turn off the heat because it seemed like too much of a statement.

Yu swallowed with a thoughtful pause. Clicking his chopsticks together, he said—neutrally, like there was nothing wrong between them at all—"I think it could use more salt."

That seemed like a good sign. Yosuke turned the heat off and reached for the salt, dumping a bit onto his hand, sprinkling it evenly across the food in the pan, and stirring everything to even it out. Yu helped himself to another sample and made a sound of approval. Without asking, he retrieved a single serving plate from the cupboards and set it on the counter next to the pan.

"I'm not sure what to do with the fish," Yu said.

At the sound of Yu's voice, it seemed, Tomo had come out from hiding and sat watchfully at the kitchen entrance. Yosuke said, "You could feed it to your cat."

"I don't know if Tomo likes _sanma_."

"It's a cat. Does it really care what kind of fish it is?"

"Tomo is a connoisseur," Yu said in a very serious tone of voice.

Yosuke gave a sighing laugh that said that after all these years, he still didn't understand Yu's sense of humor.

"We could see what he thinks, though. Why don't you offer it to him?"

Yu looked like he actually meant that. Yosuke wanted to say _Why don't you do it? _but he had a feeling he knew why. He looked over at the bag where the fish had at least stopped flapping. Why did his redemption have to involve touching a dead fish?

Cringing a little, Yosuke took the bag by its handles and faced Tomo, who watched him suspiciously. "Here," Yosuke muttered, turning the bag inside out. Tomo took a startled half-step back as the fish dropped onto the floor with a wet smack. This was, Yosuke decided, one of the most ridiculous things he had ever been made to do, even counting that time he had to dig up vegetables from a field in Inaba. "Come on. It's yours, so just _take _it." Reaching out with his left hand, Yosuke gingerly picked up the fish by its tail, gross and slimy and bony, praying it wouldn't move.

_It moved._

Yosuke yelped and let it go in Tomo's general direction; Tomo, alarmed by the fish hurtling toward him, retreated to the safety of the living room.

As his heart stopped pounding, Yosuke became aware that Yu was _laughing at him_.

"Dude, that's not funny," Yosuke squeaked indignantly, wiping fish slime off of his fingers on the closest towel within reach. Yu just shook his head as his shoulders continued to seize with laughter. "I'm not picking that up."

Still laughing to himself, Yu crossed the kitchen and picked the fish up from the floor, carrying it with both hands to the sink as Yosuke gave him a wide berth. "I'll steam it tonight while it's still fresh," Yu said, rinsing it off. "I can finish it myself, if you don't want any."

"I'm good," Yosuke muttered.

Yu chuckled to himself again as he took a knife from the knife block and nonchalantly started slicing off the fish's fins. Having no desire to watch, Yosuke nudged their dinner out of the pan and onto the plate, and brought to pan to the sink trying to avoid looking at the fish.

"Yosuke," Yu said from beside him.

Bringing the faucet head over to his half of the sink, Yosuke couldn't help but see the quick motions of Yu's hands as he scaled the fish. Damn, and it'd take longer to wash without getting his bandages wet. "Hmm?"

"You didn't want us to have a pet, did you?"

Yosuke watched brownish oil wash from the silver pan in cloudy rivulets, the kitchen lights glinting harshly against the metal and water. The sight seemed very vivid to him as he managed to say quietly, "Not really."

"I'm sorry," Yu said. He silently scraped at the fish's scales while Yosuke simply watched the water run across the pan. He didn't elaborate. Yosuke didn't know what exactly he was waiting for Yu to say. It was just weird hearing him apologize, and over something that sounded so dumb when it was said aloud. Maybe he was waiting for the other half—_I'm sorry, but...—_that never came.

Instead, when he had finished scaling and moved onto gutting the fish, Yu said, "I realized that I've been taking advantage of your kindness, and I haven't been thinking of you as an equal when it comes to what I want."

_Where did that come from!?_ Yosuke numbly reached for the dish soap, squeezed it so hard over the pan that the rising foam touched the faucet, and immediately began running his mouth. "What are you talking about, man? I'm here because I want to be." Yu shot him a quizzical look. "I mean—you're not taking advantage of anything, I decided to come with you all by myself."

"But that's what I'm talking about," Yu said. "I came here for myself, without thinking about how you'd do. Aside from Tomo, you also seem to hate your job. And I think if it were up to you, you would've stayed in Inaba with your family and our friends."

"Partner, you know I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I'd never forgive myself if I held you back with my bullshit, too."

"Still—" Yu said, voice trailing off as he tried to flick fish guts off of his fingers. Yosuke pushed the faucet over to Yu's side so he could rinse his fingers under the tap. "Thanks. ...But you're still doing it. You're always going along with what _I_ want. I should've realized sooner that it was making you unhappy."

"Partner, that's... that's really nice of you to say, actually..." Yosuke awkwardly passed the pan handle to his bandaged hand and picked up a scrubber with his left. "Um. I'm not exactly unhappy. Getting to have every day with you—it's amazing, you know?"

Yosuke could feel Yu turning to look at him, and he ducked under his bangs to hide his embarrassment as he scrubbed furiously at the pan.

It wasn't that long before Yu finally said, "I feel the same way, partner."

If Yu had kissed him right then, Yosuke probably could have died. But he didn't, instead stepping around Yosuke, mumbling to himself, "I can't believe I forgot to get everything out before cleaning the fish."

He watched Yu make himself busy around the kitchen, running here and there, fetching pots and turning green onions into neat rows of rings. It was crazy how fast he got things done. And Yosuke might have been a little unhappy with how quickly their moment had passed, leaving behind the usual distant and efficient Yu in its wake.

Yu finished arranging the fish, setting the oven timer, and coming back to the sink to wash his hands. He seemed to notice that Yosuke had simply been standing there with his arms crossed, and said to him, "We can start eating dinner. All that's left is to take the fish off the heat in fifteen minutes."

"Fifteen minutes?" Yosuke echoed.

"...Yes?" Still rubbing his hands free of soap, Yu turned his head to him with a questioning look, eyebrows half-raised in that expression that would forever mean _What kind of trouble are you going to get us into now? I'm listening._

His eyes never leaving Yu's face, Yosuke turned the water off with one decisive shove of the handle as he leaned forward, grabbed him by one arm, and kissed him so hard that Yu had to catch himself against the back of a chair.

That led to passing slightly more than fifteen minutes defacing Yu's study. They left more than half the contents of his desk on the floor before they were rudely interrupted by the timer. Then his lover deserted him for a fish.

It was kind of anticlimactic, except that nothing could have brought him down right then.

As the sounds of Yu working in the kitchen floated down the hall, Yosuke made a quick trip to the bathroom to wash his hands and brush his mussed hair. His face was still aglow—he might have even been smiling a bit to himself.

Yosuke came into the kitchen—noticing that Tomo had been rubbing against Yu's legs, but darted back to the living room as Yosuke approached—and took the plate of stir-fry from the counter, bringing it to the table and picking at it while he watched Yu put his fresh steamed fish in a plastic container for tomorrow. When Yu finished, he came over to join him with a pair of chopsticks. He looked like Yosuke had earlier in the mirror—disheveled and exuberant, quietly happy as he sat down and ate from Yosuke's stir-fry.

It was a perfect moment to say "I love you." Yosuke considered it while they ate, trying variations in his head—_Partner, you know, I love you? / I fucking love you man. / Partner, fuck, I fucking love you._—but before he could make it any more crass, Yu said, "Yosuke, you know that you're incredibly important to me."

Yosuke stomach squeezed and he couldn't swallow the food in his mouth. He could hear the _but_ at the end of that sentence.

It was cruel, hearing his train of thought echoed but twisted like that.

He swallowed somehow and said, "Yeah?" wishing Yu would spill it rather than leave him with phantoms of everything he might say next.

Yu took his time, rethinking his words under the pretense of chewing thoroughly first. Yosuke always hated that—it wasn't like carefully chosen words could blunt the blow. Not when Yosuke knew him well enough to always sense exactly what he meant.

"I think I've told you before that until Inaba, I was never close to anyone. People were kind to me as a transfer student. But they already had their groups of friends, so once the novelty wore off, I attended club meetings and that was about it."

With his chopsticks suspended in the air, Yosuke watched Yu with wide eyes. Yu took a piece of pork and stuck it in his mouth as he looked up to meet Yosuke's eyes for a moment, feigning confidence, before turning his eyes back to the plate of food which must have felt much safer.

"The worst was probably when I was fourteen, the trip that convinced my parents to leave me in Inaba the next time they had to work overseas. We spent that year in Hat Yai—in Thailand. I didn't know any Thai and my parents didn't want me to lose a year of schooling, so they sent me to a British international school there. It wasn't very good. I think everyone only went because they had to go somewhere, during some disconnected part of their life. You'd think it would have made me feel less alone, when everyone else was like me, but it didn't. I just fell into not caring like everyone else."

Yu paused here, and Yosuke's mind tried to catch up with what was happening as he set his chopsticks down. It was clear, at least, that he had been forgiven. Yu rarely ever made himself vulnerable, much less talked about things that had caused him pain. What he couldn't figure out was why Yu was telling him now.

"I spent a lot of time with the stray cats," he said, and it all made sense.

"Oh."

Yu forced a smile. "They helped me get through."

Some shadowy part of him couldn't help but blurt out, "But what about now? You seemed happy about—about us living together..." But Yosuke stopped himself before he said, _Why do you need the cat now that you have me?_

"I am," Yu said. "I'm not saying that I need Tomo to get by. Just that... there's something nice about having a cat around. They don't care about where you are in life or what you say to them. Their love is simple. It's good to have sometimes." Yu laid his chopsticks down against the plate, letting his hands rest on the table. "Yosuke..."

"Yeah?"

"You know that time back in high school, when we confronted Namatame?"

"The time you stopped me from committing murder?"

"The time we got into that fight, yes. And you came back." Yu's socked foot brushed against his ankle under the table. "I think that was the first time I'd ever had a fight with someone and everything still turned out all right."

Yu was being so open that it scared him a little. This whole day had been so weird, Yosuke thought, that tomorrow none of it would probably seem real, neatly tucked away in some strange pocket dimension where Yu would let him screw him on his desk and then talk about his secrets.

Keeping his mouth shut—not trusting himself not to say anything, in fear it would be something stupid to defuse the situation—Yosuke touched their feet together.

God, playing footsies under the table was so gay.

But it was nice.

Feeling a little like he was relenting in that moment, even though it had probably been clear to both of them for the last few hours, Yosuke said, "You can keep Tomo." Yu visibly brightened—visibly enough for Yosuke, anyway. The little flash in his eyes always gave it away whenever he got what he wanted. He'd have to work on that in the courtroom. Yosuke kicked him lightly and added, "No more. _Just_ Tomo. And get him to stop attacking my feet."

"Tomo is enough," Yu said. Then in a warm tone of voice, leaving no room to confuse it with his sense of humor—"...Thank you."

It was crazy, how this guy he'd known from high school, familiar and mundane to him as an old shirt, could still give him chills like that.

Yu picked his chopsticks back up and continued eating. "Yeah, uh, no problem, partner," Yosuke mumbled. He wished he could've found the perfect words to punch him right back in the heart. Instead, he opened his lame mouth and settled for, "I love you, you know?"


	5. Tomo (Reprise)

"I still don't like you," Yosuke said to Tomo as he inverted a can of cat food over his bowl, trying not to touch its contents. Tomo observed him measuredly from the kitchen entrance, flicking his tail as if trying to decide whether to accept this generous offering from his least favorite person. As Yosuke crossed over to the living room, Tomo watched him without yielding any ground. "I'm doing this for Yu," Yosuke announced. "Take it or leave it."

Tomo rose to his feet and swatted Yosuke's leg briefly with his tail as he went to eat. Whatever that meant, Yosuke was fairly certain he felt the same way.


End file.
